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San Francisco is a city that's famously full of instantly recognizable landmarks: from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Transamerica Pyramid, it’s easy for visitors to match many of our skyline’s star features with their guidebook descriptions. But for every Coit Tower or Alcatraz Island, there’s also an eye-catching oddity whose name might not spring so easily to mind.

Travel and exercise don't always go together – we get it. Between pub crawls, restaurant check lists, museum visits, and endless photo stops, we can all let fitness fall by the wayside while we try to experience everything else a new city has to offer.

Northern California's beautiful in any light, but it's hard to beat the glow of a great big silvery moon for ambience. This August, the moon will reach the closest point in its orbit of the Earth, giving us the eye-popping spectacle of an extra-large "super moon." Not in our lovely neck of the woods on August 10th this year?

The epicenter of all things trendy, beautiful, and delicious in San Francisco's hip Mission District, Valencia Street is more than just a thoroughfare: it's a melting pot. To the East of Valencia lies the old-school Mission neighborhood, where authentic taquerias are packed in several to a block and storefronts blast contemporary Mexican music. To the West, apartment rental prices soar, gourmet grocery stores thrive, and techies work on their tans in Dolores Park.

Sometimes, a hostel is just a hostel. But when it comes to HI-USA's Northern California properties, sometimes a hostel is a trip back in time. From Marin to Montara, San Francisco to Sacramento, our hostels' walls have stories to tell.

There's art, seemingly, just about everywhere you look in San Francisco: from the Legion of Honor, MOMA, and the DeYoung Museum, to the large-scale street art of the Mission District, this city, you might say, was made to get the creative juices flowing.